When I left my summer job in Condon to go back to college for my junior year, I didn’t know I would never live in my parents’ home again.
I broke things off with the older man, got my own apartment, and focused on my studies. But I still wanted love. The kind that lasted. And, while I thought it was possible to have the always-excited never-ending love, I tried to be more like Leanne, to have a plan for who might be the right person for the long term.
It didn’t take me long to find someone who I thought would fit well into my future and into my parents’ wishes for me.
At a college party, I felt a tap on my shoulder. “Jackie Shannon?” This new man was slim and muscular with hair feathered and styled.
I recognized him. Sam. He’d lived in Condon until he was thirteen. He’d been a friend of Brad’s, and his parents had been friends of my parents. Back then he had short hair and thick-rimmed glasses. He and his family had moved away when I was eleven, and I hadn’t seen him since.
We went outside and stood in the driveway while kids in vests and flare-legged pants went in and out of the party house. We talked about my family and his, people we knew from Condon. He was almost finished with his degree at the university. He was way cuter than I remembered.
He asked me what I liked to read.
“Oh, you know,” I said. I thought of the books I read when I got bored of textbooks. Sidney Sheldon, Jackie Collins, romance novels. I shrugged. “I’m drawing a blank right now.”
He said he’d turn me on to some new stuff, good books.
Within days I’d fallen into bed with him. Within days I was falling in love again.
That fall was colder than usual for Eugene. The heat in my apartment was unpredictable. Sam’s apartment was warm and had books and a stereo and a long comfortable sofa.
He gave me a book of short stories by Raymond Carver: Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? The world of reading and books changed for me then; stories could be simple and real and about the kind of people I grew up with.
Sam remembered overnights at our place when he was a boy, how cool it was to go out to the barn and ride the horses and hang out in the bunkhouse. He knew about the bunkhouse and the barn and the horses. He knew Condon and my family.
The familiarity of him was a relief, but he was enough different. He’d been to Europe! He knew about literature and poetry! He danced with me, the two of us alone in his apartment!
Within a few months I took him to Condon, the same weekend Nana went into the hospital in Portland with her lungs full of fluid. After that weekend Mom sent a letter.
Just a little note to say we enjoyed the weekend. Everyone liked Sam—of course it was easier since we had known him as a boy. He is on the top of Crisi’s list. He really drew her out and talked to her like an adult. . . .
This path would make her happy. This path seemed right, the way fairy tales ended, happily ever after. We couldn’t know more worry would come. Things I had control over and things I didn’t.
Mom’s letter said this too:
I’m glad you stopped to see Nana. I talked to the doctor, and I’m afraid the tumor is malignant. . . .
On that visit to Nana in the hospital in Portland, Sam had held my hand down the long hall to her room. She sat up and raised her arms to hug me when we came in. She was tiny and pale against the white of the sheets and pillow. “Oh, there’s my college girl.” She remembered Sam and asked about his family. We only stayed a while. When we left, I stopped outside her room. I began to cry. I’d never been around a dying person, but I knew that was what was happening. Sam put his arms around me. For the first time, I felt the comfort of letting a man hold me in my sadness, hold me for some other reason than love or sex.
After Christmas I moved in with Sam. No one said how it was like the year before, a pattern, me moving in with a man for the second year in a row. But this time there was no icy disapproval. Sam was from home. He was only a few years older than me. I was happy. This time my family was happy too.
Early spring, slow dancing to Chicago’s “Happy Man,” both of us easy on bourbon, Sam asked me to marry him. I said yes. Mom was eighteen when she married. Leanne was nineteen, and so was Pat. Some of my friends had already married. We would wait until the following spring. I would be twenty-one by then. Grown-up. An age of sureness.
I called home and told Mom and Dad the news, and also that I wouldn’t be coming home at the end of the school year. I would take classes through the summer and graduate early the following spring. The wedding would be in Condon right after. Then I would start work and begin paying back my college loans.
Leanne sent me a letter of congratulations on our engagement. She said she thought Mom and Dad might be a little sad that I wasn’t coming home again, except to visit. She said,
We have all thought of you as a college student for so long, it’s hard to change one’s long-range thinking, but by next spring I’m sure everyone will have adjusted to the idea of you being a career girl. Anyway, I wish you the best in your marriage and your career.
And she said this,
I don’t know how much Mom and Dad have told you, but Nana isn’t very well and if you want to see her, you should come home soon.
I went to Condon for one last visit with Nana.